It seemed, for a very long while, that the "king of the world" had all but abdicated his throne.

Twelve years have passed since Kapuskasing-born James Cameron, 55, broke all box-office records with his megahit Titanic – upward of $1.8 billion internationally, still the top-grossing film in cinema history.

It was also, at the time, the most expensive movie ever made, though its then-staggering $200 million price tag has since been matched or eclipsed by the likes of King Kong, Harry Potter, James Bond, Superman, the X-Men, the second and third installments of both Spider-Man and Pirates of the Caribbean and, coincidentally, the third and fourth Terminators, neither of which the disenfranchised franchise founder had anything (other than an obligatory screen credit) to do with.

In Titanic's wake, Cameron appeared to have vanished off the face of the Earth – and indeed, was spending an inordinate amount of time beneath, deep underwater, much of that poking around the wreckage of the actual Titanic, and playing with emergent IMAX 3-D technology.

It is that technology that has at last allowed Cameron to surface ... and propel himself back up into the furthest reaches of space and studio financing with Avatar, a computer-animated and live-action sci-fi extravaganza with an estimated investment of $500 million riding on its reception by legions of genre fans eagerly anticipating its Dec. 18 release.

But first there was the annual San Diego Comic-Con, geek Mecca and nexus of all that currently constitutes contemporary pop culture, where Cameron came last July to award their patience and pre-emptive enthusiasm with an exclusive – by several days, anyway – preview glimpse into the immediate future, an epic adventure of intergalactic colonialism in which humans remotely insert their psyches into the bodies of long-limbed, glowing, blue alien constructs.

Towering head and shoulders (literally, at 6-foot-2) over other attending blockbuster brethren – Tim Burton, Peter Jackson, Zack Snyder, Robert Zemeckis, Jon Favreau, Roland Emmerich, et al. – the lanky auteur was greeted, first with reverent awe, then thunderous ovation, by both the conventioneers and the (predominantly Internet) press.

He was pretty much preaching to the choir here; few at the 6,000-strong Avatar panel session and subsequent packed-to-the-rafters media conference were not already intimately familiar with Avatar's extended genesis.

"This thing has been gestating in fragments for a long time," Cameron said, "even since the mid-'70s, when I first started trying my hand at screenwriting" – an epiphany triggered by his first viewing of Star Wars in 1977, when he was working as a truck driver in Niagara Falls.

"I don't even remember the transition point from being a fan reader of science fiction and as an artist drawing things, drawing spacecraft, drawing aliens, to actually, you know, putting them into scenes and so on ..."

He does remember the first early result, a student film and unproduced feature called Xenogenesis, set in a similar "bioluminescent" world he would return to for Avatar.

Cameron spent the early '80s learning his craft, a long and tumultuous apprenticeship as a production designer for schlockmaster Roger Corman on low-budget genre flicks – crafting for the first of them, the cheesy Seven Samurai rip-off Battle Beyond the Stars (scripted by fellow film newbie John Sayles), a spacefaring "mother ship" with a prow shaped like a pair of massive breasts.

(When I brought this up years later at the True Lies press junket, Cameron was genuinely delighted – he had honestly believed no one would notice.)

He went on to design and shoot the visual effects for the John Carpenter cult classic Escape from New York and, in 1981, stepped in for the fired Italian director of the Corman sequel Piranha II: The Spawning, an experience so traumatic the fledgling filmmaker was plagued by nightmares of being hunted down and killed by a robot from the future.

Thus was born The Terminator, and a skyrocketing writing and directing career that quickly included the 1986 Alien sequel, the underwater epic The Abyss, a bigger, shinier, vastly more expensive Terminator 2, the misfire espionage comedy romance True Lies and finally, in 1997, Titanic.

All the while, Avatar was percolating inside his head – particularly when, as the CEO and creative engine of his own, newly founded effects house, Digital Domain, he actively started seeking an appropriate outlet for escalating advances in 3-D filmmaking.

"I just kind of put together all those floating fragments (of story)," he explained. "I did the same thing on Aliens ... you know, I had already written story fragments prior, and when I got the gig to write (it), I just grabbed a bunch of stuff I'd already been thinking about and I slammed it together. It felt kind of mercenary at the time ... you know, like I was just throwing crap at it."

Crafting Avatar, he insisted, was a more organic process. "What happens is, you know, over time, you rewrite it and you massage it and you improve the storyline and all those sorts of things, and, I don't know, I guess there's kind of a spark ..."

A very, very expensive spark, and, notwithstanding Cameron's Titanic track record, a considerable risk for its financiers. "The studio guys, God love 'em," Cameron enthused, a phrase rarely heard in Hollywood. "I mean they signed up to write a big cheque for this movie, and they've backed our play a hundred per cent, all the way down the line, thick or thin."

Even when they didn't quite get it. "At the beginning they would ask questions like, `Do (the aliens) need to be blue?' `Do they need to have a tail?' You know, things like that. And I thought, well, yeah, of course they do. I mean, we had a lot of fun with the design, but we never asked ourselves if people would accept it or not. That's the huge advantage of actually being a geek fan yourself – you don't ask yourself questions like that."

Still, the movie is going to have to transcend its core audience and appeal to the masses to offset its cost.

"When you live with something over the total creative arc of, in this case, 14 years, you start to take certain things for granted," Cameron acknowledged. "But you've got to remember the people coming in cold, you know, starting from zero. So it has to operate on a very visceral level of kind of universal human archetype, if you will.

"I want to make sure that I haven't left anything out in terms of making the story fully accessible to everybody, and not just the fan audience. And by fan audience I mean somebody who knows all the references, knows all the other films, they're steeped in the lore, that sort of thing.

``But, you know, the construction worker, or somebody's mom ... we've gotta make a movie for everybody.

"They'd better be ready to go blue, I guess."

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